Gifted & Talented News
2023-24 Gifted Education Learning Series
- August 30
- October 25
- December 6
- February 21
- April 10
If your district holds early releases on Wednesdays, you might inquire about this professional learning as an alternative to in-district activities for that day. Register for the series of 5 sessions to earn licensure renewal credit, or pick an individual session or two that match your current needs. We hope you can join us!
Participants will have two options for accessing this learning opportunity:
1. Register for the course (100% attendance required, 1 license renewal credit)
2. Register for individual sessions of interest, up to 4 (No credit workshop)
Update Contact Information
Does your district have someone new to serving gifted and talented students this year? Has your own role changed? To help us ensure this newsletter reaches the right readers, please email kboonstra@heartlandaea.org with updated staff changes.
In the meantime, please forward this edition of the newsletter to colleagues who might benefit!
Inquiry Learning
Have you been looking for ways to bring more student inquiry into programming this year? Check out this post from John Spencer. After sharing about how to build a foundation for inquiry, he offers ideas for a Wonder Day or Wonder Week to foster student curiosity.
Kate is reading...
Many of us read more fiction in the summer, and I'm no exception. My favorite this year was Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It's a modern retelling of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield set in southern Appalachia. Gifted education is not necessarily a focus of the novel, but the protagonist's advanced abilities are noticed by a teacher and he receives gifted services in visual arts. This passage is from chapter 30:
"The ones he gave me were all picture tests. Example: here's some connected squares that are an unfolded box, pick which box it would be after you put it back together. Pages and pages of this crap, so easy it's like a game. It was the only test I'd finished in forever. I thought it was a warmup for the real tests. Wrong again. Mr. Armstrong tricked me. These were the special ones they use for Gifted and Talented, which he said I was. Which is ridiculous. All the sudden he's talking about what catching up I'll have to do, and if I move into this track in middle school, I can take art class in high school instead of making birdhouses in shop."
Kyra is reading...
Give me a good young adult fiction book and my porch swing in the summer and I am a happy camper. This summer, my reading list has been focused on recent Newbery honor books that I have fallen behind on. Two books by Christina Soontornvat are my current favorites:
The Last Mapmaker (2023) and A Wish in the Dark (2021). One additional book, All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys' Soccer Team remains on my list (2021). Three honor books in such a short period of time is a quite a feat and I have not been able to put them down!
I also just finished We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly (2020), a story set in 1986 at the time of the launch of the Challenger Space Shuttle.
In all three books, the main characters are gifted, all in different time periods and in different ways. Both authors weave their stories around these characters' abilities. Each would be a great choice for literature circles, independent reading, or read-alouds with discussion.